Wonder Woman: Earth One [News, Images, So on]

This blog had not been set up when Wonder Woman: Earth One was initially announced. Since it is set up now, I thought I would collect all of the information and art previews I could find on this book to be your one-stop source on WW: Earth One!

Teased back in March, officially announced May 10, 2013, Wonder Woman: Earth One will be a new original graphic novel set in the same universe as Superman: Earth One (J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis) and Batman: Earth One (Geoff Johns and Gary Frank) written by Grant Morrison with art by Yanick Paquette.

This is some of the most fun I’ve had in a long time, because it’s a completely different type of comic book. Usually I don’t do masses of research, but for Wonder Woman, I’ve actually been working my way through the entire history of feminism. I want this to be f—ing serious, you know? I want this to be really, really good, to reflect not only what women think, but what men think of women. I’m trying to do something really different from what’s been done with the character before. That one’s been amazing fun, because it’s nothing like anything I’ve ever done before.

It’s not a comic about superheroes punching each other. It’s about the sexes and how we feel about one another, and what a society of women cut off from the rest of the world for 3,000 years might look like, and what kind of sexuality, what kind of philosophy, what kind of science would that have developed, and how would that impact our world if it actually suddenly became apparent that these women existed.

We’re also going to deal with the notion of Wonder Woman having a costume, which I think is almost ridiculous. So we’re playing with that a little bit and doing something different from that, which surprisingly nobody has ever done. We’re going to do something with how she looks, which is quite different.

I’m really focusing a lot more on the mother and daughter story in it between Hippolyta and Diana. I want it to be that kind of book, a story about women.

Diana’s a lot more defiant in it and she’s not sent to man’s world — she runs away to it so there’s a very different dynamic between her and Hippolyta, and the entire thing basically takes place around a trial.

I always felt one of the fundamentals of Wonder Woman in at least the last two decades is that she always seems to be on trial, and I don’t mean that in a story sense. Everyone’s always saying, “Why does nobody buy Wonder Woman? Why isn’t she any good?” (Laughs) it seems like she’s always on trial, so I thought if I literalized that and made the story basically the Amazons bringing her back home after her first adventure away and putting her on trial, it’d be different from anything else you might see. The Amazons have their own ways of doing things.

It’s kind of asking Wonder Woman to justify herself, which I feel has almost been what the character’s had to do for a long time.

In the same USAToday Interview, Morrison was asked “We’ve had endless versions of Superman and Batman in media. On the other hand, we’ve had one Wonder Woman show in the 1970s and, more recently, a TV pilot that didn’t get to series. Is the character just that tricky to pull off in an on-screen fashion?” To which he replied:

People have just convinced themselves that that’s true. I know Warner Bros. isn’t particularly keen on launching movies with female leads, and most of the big studios aren’t. It’s just a thing in Hollywood — they have fears about this. They also believe the audience is composed mainly of 18- to 30-year-old men who don’t want to know about women. (Laughs)

There are certain attitudes that have been around for a while and I think people just don’t question them anymore, and things like Wonder Woman always fall prey to it. I think you could have easily made an amazing Wonder Woman film if you had Angelina Jolie in her prime doing it. I think it would have done well, but I don’t know if there’s a big-name actress who can do it now.

The executives just run these things over in their heads and say, “I don’t know if it’s worth putting money into this. It’s not a surefire hit. The boys want to see Batman brooding.” Believe me, that’s what they think: “Boys don’t want to see a bunch of Amazons running around.”

The book doesn’t have a firm release date right now (“sometime”), but is scheduled to be 120 pages.

And now, the fun part… More artwork by Yanick Paquette! Click for larger size: